So 2GB RAM is more then enough, I run 8.2-STABLE amd64 from about 2011-04.

... any reasons to stick to i386?

__________________religions, worst damnation of mankind"If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." Linus TorvaldsLinux is not UNIX! Face it! It is not an insult. It is fact: GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not UNIX”.vermaden's:linksresourcesdeviantartspreadbsd

Depending on the P4 chip, you may be able to run the amd64 version of FreeBSD. You'd have to look at it under FreeBSD, though, to see if it supports LM (note the AMD features below, taken from my FreeBSD 8.2 box):

While you shouldn't need to tune anything, you can guarantee better performance if you do some manually ZFS tunings. Depending on what else you will be running on the box, you will want to limit how much RAM is used by the ZFS ARC. For example, my home "server" runs Samba, NFS, DLNA services, torrent downloading, etc, so I limit the ARC to only 768 MB (out of 2 GB) to leave room for the other services.

You will also want to make sure you disabled prefetching (it should be disabled automatically, but it's good to manually disable it as well).